invite anyone at Group-Creation-Process ?

I do like you Plugin very much, but as you know I am missing the chance to invite anyone at the Group-Creaion-Process.
When a user starts a Group, he usually does not have any friends yet, so it would be benficial for the website when a user who creates a Group is able to invite his external friends to join his group.

@Erich73 I think the Boone addressed this before that the group wasn’t fully created or something. So that’s why he didn’t implement it at creation. I’ve personally modified the plugin so that you can only invite external users by email (not existing users). Plus, I’ve integrated it to automatically join the user to the referring group. So, next I’m going to work on integrating the Invite User by Email into the user creation process. So, once the new user joins, they get the group and then can invite others to join as well.

Erich this subject was done to death wasn’t it? sort of seems to keep cropping up again

Again what is the issue with the user having created the group that they then have to visit that group and start to send invites, if that is what you are thinking is the issue? from what I remember it was that you couldn’t send the invites from the actual group creation stage or something wasn’t it?

So it looks as though there will be two versions of essentially the same plugin floating around. I think the idea of auto joining a new user to the group designated by the email inviter is a good one as that step can be confusing to a new user just signed up; as for allowing unfettered and instant ability to send invites and invitation to spam trouble but thats your lookout personally I’ll retain a modicum of control on the aspect of sending invites and group creation.

techguy if you do fork the plugin so to speak it would be nice if the changes were integrated into the original so as to keep things sane and rational?

@Erich73 I’ve created a ton of customizations that are specific to my site. Not to mention some interactions with another plugin I wrote to have some specific group information. For example, each group can define the email message they want to be sent among other things.

I don’t plan on releasing all of my changes as a separate plugin. However, I’d be happy to send what I’ve done to Boone to integrate into this plugin as he sees fit. I definitely want to keep things sane and rational.

the only issue is the BP-default “Send Invites” on Group Creation.
This screen is just confusing. Imagine somebody creating a new group and then at this screen he will be stuck because he has no friends to invite, literally because he just joined the website and actually does not have any friends at the website yet. Therefore it would be better to have the “Send invites to external friends” at that specific screen.

@erich73 Yes I get what you mean, but wasn’t that partly what was discussed some time back; there is the sister? plugin ‘Invite Anyone’ [edit]Of course it’s not a sister plugin but the old one updated with the new email features – *sigh* I do get confused but that does…[/edit] allow group admins to send invites to all members not just those that you have set as friends, so this solves that initial problem? or maybe not?

Being able to send email invites from the group creation process was – if I remember correctly – mildly problematical, a difficult one to work out how to get to that process and perhaps back again without losing screens or confusing the user.

I’m always very mindful of just how easily novice users get confused with using apps , and not just BP; I tend to think sometimes it’s better to keep processes short and sweet with plenty of good detailed explanatory guides, in this case explaining that having created the group one would then need to head to their account screens and access the email invite facility.

I do see it from the other point of view, but not sure it’s really a huge burden on the user to complete one step then sit back take a breather, review their new group establish they’re happy with it, then move on to email invites to the newly created group.

I think that the current default BuddyPress “Send Invites” screen at the “Group Creation Process” is very confusing for people who create a new group.
I would rather delete the “Send Invites” screen or better yet have Boones plugin modified in a way that the person who creates a new group can invite his friends who are actually not yet memebers of the website.

This would speed-up number of members to the website, as Group-creators would be able to invite there real friends into their Group at my website.

With the current BP-default set-up, it is very hard to generate new users to my website.
Changing this “Send Invites” screen to invite people who are not yet members of the website, would give the chance to win more users to the website.

Hopefully Boone can make a new Plugin based on that, just modifying his current Plugin a bit. Maybe having an option in the backend being able to choose what kind of “Invite” you wanna have at the “Group Creation Process”, like having an option in the Backend-settings for “invite internal friends only” or “invite external friends only”.

Again I ask though or point out that nothing actually stops them from inviting friends via email does it? I don’t get why you say it’s very hard, users creating groups CAN invite their friends to join via the email invites they just have to go to their account where they get to perform this process and select groups to invite these friends to.

If you need to sort the users in the list alphabetically (by user_nicename rather than by user_id) you can change a couple of lines in the group-invites.php… around line 390 or something, just change the querys to the below… works fine for me.

@erich73@hnla I agree with both of you that the Send Invites step during group creation is a bit confusing. Adding Invite Anyone makes it a bit worse, but it’s not at root a problem with Invite Anyone. There’s something about inviting members to a group that is not really the same thing as the rest of the things that you do during the setup – avatars, group description, activating forums, etc all feel like you’re setting up the *metadata* of the group, while inviting friends seems like something you do once the group exists. (At least that’s how it seems to me.)

Erich, if you’re uncomfortable with the way that it works, maybe it’s best to eliminate the Send Invites step from group creation. On line 74 of invite-anyone/group-invites/group-invites.php, change true in var $enable_create_step = true; to false. I would also suggest putting a message on one of the previous pages (by editing the appropriate template) that tells members that they’ll be able to invite people to the group by clicking the Send Invites tab once they’ve finished creating the group.

Is there any chance to eliminate the “Invite-Anyone” from the Group-Creation-Process, but having this available for the Group-Admin afterwards, so that the Group-Admin is able to invite people to his Group later on ? So skip it from the Group-Creation-Process but still having it available for the Group-Admin ?

As I am not a coder, is there a way to set this option in the DashBoard-backend ?

Hi Erich – I’ll make a toggle on the Dashboard in a future version, but for now you can change that one line to false and that’ll do it. Group admins (or group members, depending on how you have it set at Dashboard > Invite Anyone) will still be able to send invitations after the group has been created.

@boone Hi Boone, I hope you’re doing well. Thank you very much for the Invite Anyone plugin. It worked like a charm until I added r-a-y’s autocomplete fix to my theme’s function.php files. Any chance you can look at the coding below and tell me why it conflicts with your Invite Only autocomplete function during the send invite procedure?